Ever wonder how you can increase a car’s performance without plugging in a single modification?
We are accustomed to purchasing several mods (that’s modifications) for our first car like racing filters, headers, high-tension wires but never really felt the speed or power differential.
A tuning technique has been developed for cars that will surely increase the horsepower and torque without the need for any additional modification. It’s called reflashing or remapping. It guarantees anywhere from eight to 12 percent better fuel consumption, along with 30 to 50 additional hp and boost for diesel cars. How does all that work? All that is needed is a laptop. We made a quick visit to SpeedLab located in Quezon City to see first-hand how the service shop does the reflashing process.
The first step when reflashing a car is to connect a laptop to the car through the OBD2 port using a flash drive. From the ECU, using a specific software, it start to read the data provided by your vehicle.
Before they can perform the actual process on your vehicle, they first have to test your vehicle’s capacity to better see the gains that your car can produce by using a dyno tester. After getting all the information from your car, the reflashing begins.
This entails changing specific codes and files that your stock vehicle has then plugging in an entirely different file sheet. The computer then will show all the maps pertaining to how the current engine of the car is performing. After the data transfer, the car will be checked through through a dyno machine once again to check how much power the car has actually gained from the reflashing, and to see if it was able to reach the desired value.
Numbers are adjusted during the whole process until the desired gain is reached. However, not all cars can be reflashed. SpeedLab offers a different process with the exact same benefits with the use of a “unichip,” a universal module that works on any car, any brand – diesel or gas. The whole process of ECU reflashing or remapping will cost you P25,0000 pesos with the use of their dyno machine tester. Reflashing doesn’t do damage to the car and it does not void the vehicle’s warranty. It’s not a cheap mod, but the benefits are real. You will be rewarded every time you step on the throttle, too.
